Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

She’s barely four feet tall. I lie on top of her, it’s as if she disappears into the ground under me. When she bends over me, I’m a child between her breasts. She is soft as no other body is soft and she smells of animal fat and buchu and the stuff she uses to starch Geertruy’s bonnets. The following few months we search each other out in the veldt and behind the homestead and there are toothmarks on our bodies and our crotches are raw and sore.

Regard us well, spy on us if you can, because after two centuries I can still not capture our lovemaking in words. Words like passion and all-consuming create no pictures of her nipples. Geertruy taught me to read and write properly; I know what it’s worth. Rather unbutton the front of your pants or slip a hand in under your dress and see her back straining.

See, I look much older than twenty that day when I walk far into the veldt. The thunderclouds are massing low and full. The black clouds make the plain seem brighter, the greens and yellows sharper. I pick tracks at random. I home in on an oribi spoor, then foot by foot I follow the tracks of a mountain tortoise. I follow a footfall as long as the pace pleases me, until an alluring track crosses the previous one. I follow a klipspringer in the direction of the river; I trot and run along the bank with the speed of a rhebok. The stream winds its shallow course through the poort. Then the spoor that piques my notice is above me in the air: the whistlings of swifts flashing over and past one another, as if knotting and unknotting invisible loops. On their way northwards. I wonder how far Ezeljacht is from France and my ancestors. Dancing and chirking they stretch their sable wings, the wings wapping like hands clapping all around me. They break their circles and fly high into the sky. One of the swallows skims down low over my head and disappears into the ridge across the river. For a moment it seems as if the bird flies into the rocks without breaking its speed. Then another one sweeps down, a wide curve, and it, too, flies into the rocky ridge. Two crows hover in the sky, cawing, high above the swallows. The birds funnel down, one after the other they fly themselves to smithereens against the rocks and then shoot out again reborn.

When I get closer, I see the cave on the other side of the stream. An overhanging rock in the ridge into which the swallows disappear. The place into which the swallows evanesce is more than an overhang but not yet quite a cave. In sunlight you’ll carry on past it without glancing up; in a thunderstorm it will be like a mountain stronghold to you, a palace hewn out of the earth. It’s not much of a hiding place, but it is a womb or fort for somebody searching for one or the other and not finding anything else in the vicinity.

In the middle of the stream I step into a hole, am suddenly up to my waist under water. Then I reach the reeds and a few paces up take me to the cave. I struggle through the umbrella thorn. I walk in under the overhang where the birds flew straight into the earth or should be lying smashed in front of the rock. I find them chattering in the cracks, hidden in mud nests under the overhang. The rocky roof is soot-blackened. The walls are covered in paintings.

Great vague figures in charcoal extend across the rock walls, to the left many pictures in ochre. The soil is tramped solid; generations of feet have danced here. A long, narrow gash extends a foot or so above the surface. It is dark in there and smells of dassie shit and nobody will ever know how far back it goes. Among the painted beasts are figures that are human and no longer human: dancers with the forked tails of fishes or water maidens or swifts.

I turn around to the chattering behind me. The swallows fly to and fro past the overhang. They are scarcely a few arms’ lengths away, but however close they are, they still look like far-off falcons. Believe me, the sun reflects in their right eye, the moon in their left.

The sky is emptied of their noise, my eyes on the rock face again. Neither-fish-nor-fowl people in a ring. Rust-brown figures with swallowtails bent forward, leaning on walking sticks. This drawing is small, all the figures fit easily under my hand. I jerk away my hand, wipe my damp palm on my trousers. A few figures in the centre of the scene, more prominent, with delicate fingers clenched around dancing sticks, convulsed with the power boiling inside them, and under it, next to a line tracing an upside-down arch and disappearing into the rock to the left, a school of winged creatures that, arms stretched back, swim-fly along the line, until they melt into the rock.

It seems as if the figures enter and leave the outcrops and cracks in the rock. At times the figures seem to start up from smears of paint. I can see that the drawings have been spread out against the wall since whenever, but it’s not the sheer age of it that keeps me here. Age is nothing to be proud of. I can’t get my mind round the pictures, but I keep gazing. All that I’m sure of is that the guy who painted this stuff was not confused. I walk home. The lighter clouds have been burnt away before the sun. The overhang and its swallows and picture put behind me. The moon like a faded stain of last night’s shining, still in the sky.

Months later Geertruy is making soap. She asks the children in the yard to fetch her some ganna bush for the lye. The children tell tales of a leopard lurking in the kloofs of late. She asks me to go with them to keep an eye. I drag Saterdag along for company. We find a leopard track and walk up the kloof with the children’s voices echoing behind us. At the far end of the kloof we come upon more pictures. Nothing as delicate and clear as the swallow people: faded eland and elephants against a rock without overhang where the sun and rain efface the traces of human beings.

Saterdag goes quiet and runs his hand over the drawings. I tell him about the swallow people in the poort. Saterdag remembers what he was told as a child. Stories about his mother and the old folk who once hunted in the mountains before they were brought down to sit and fatten the Senekal cattle. He tells me about the rock that is the veil between this world and another. He tells how worlds melt into one another in the caves where magicians ape nature and where people turn into birds to fly to the other side and how the drawings keep these voyages in motion. He tells it all to me as he remembers the old folk told it to him and in this way he mimics and parrots them without ever having danced like that.

I don’t pay him much attention. Saterdag drones on. Now and again the children come and listen to a fragment of story before scrambling into the ganna bush again.

Those swallows, Coenraad, they know when to move on, they know when the bad weather with its lightning comes. Nobody can catch those swallows. They fly so fast because they’re little more than wind. Those wind birds. Windvogelen.

We make ourselves small, Windvogel, I say. Like a light breeze. Then, one day, from out of the blue sky we let loose a goddam storm on them.

Windvogel, says Windvogel, deep in thought. Windbird. Yes, he says, Windvogel gets me together more than Saterdag.

I come of age and I sue Scrotum Senekal because he’s not paying me my share of the butter profits. He promised to pay me for my labour on the farm. Every blessed time we walk past the four butter-churners, it’s the same story. Swears high and low that half the proceeds of the butter will be mine as soon as I turn twenty-one. But for the last few years the wet blood-fart has been too much of a spineless slacker for the month-long journey to the Cape markets. One evening I ask him again about the butter. He grumbles in his greyer-by-the-day beard about the low prices. How the butter has started stinking by the time they get to the Cape. He whinges about the Bushmen and the foot-and-mouth and the ravening creatures lying in wait next to the road for an ox wagon. I sit back and listen with my smile. Geertruy jumps up and starts mewling and snarls something at me. She says my heart has gone cold. I say it’s because I no longer lie by their hearth like their damn dog. The case is turned down and I appeal and the magistrate rules that Snail-trail Senekal must inspan his oxen and get his hindquarters to the Cape and give me the money. So there, thank God for the powers that be. Hardly two years later the magistrate gets to hear about us again when I batter Snake-slime Senekal half to death.